Influences and George MacDonald’s Sermons

I’ve been reading George MacDonald’s novels for many years. This year I set aside the fiction in favor of two sets of sermons. I don’t remember who recommended that I read some of his sermons, but I’m glad that person did. MacDonald writes clearly and passionately in these “unspoken” addresses, a difficult combination to pull off. And his lessons are quite good. Some examples: Life has many daily questions the Bible doesn’t answer, which is why we must daily rely on Jesus for guidance. Each follower of Christ will receive in Heaven a new name written on a white stone, unique and secret because each believer can worship God in a way that no one else can. We could not hate our cruelest enemy except for a shred of humanity in him that makes us think he could be different, and that shred is what we can love. Jesus gives the rich young ruler things to do in order to receive eternal life rather than things to believe or things to be partly because when someone asks how to reach the top of a mountain, you don't say, "Put your foot on the peak."

I know of MacDonald only through C. S. Lewis and read him at Lewis’s recommendation. And although I don’t always understand why Lewis admired him so deeply, here in the sermons, I see the influence of MacDonald on Lewis very clearly. Why does God even have his children ask for things if He knows what we need and can give it? Because prayer is the thing we need most, says MacDonald, and I hear the echoes of that excellent point reverberating throughout Lewis’s work. Miracles show the hastening of natural processes, says MacDonald, an idea repeated by Lewis a few decades later in his book on miracles. And when MacDonald says that God will strip away our sin layer by layer, I can’t help but think of Lewis’s Edmund having his dragon skin peeled from him.

Strangely, I also saw influences of Hegel on MacDonald. Hegel, the ultimate philosopher of progress in the century of progress, essentially taught that the purpose of the universe was to evolve to the point that some part of it understood it as a whole. In other words, according to Hegel, the purpose of the universe was to produce Hegel. I see Hegel’s influence where MacDonald talks about progressive revelation as God’s working toward humanity’s comprehension of Him. I see it again where MacDonald says, “Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.”

I’m far from alone in seeing Hegel as a big problem. Right now, I’m also reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (more on that book in a later post), in which protagonist Joseph Knecht blames Hegel for the world wars of the twentieth century. As Lewis said that MacDonald baptized his imagination, I could say that MacDonald baptized Hegel’s ideas, Still, two months ago, I would never have imagined a line of influence from the pagan Hegel to the Christian C. S. Lewis with only one stop in between.

Off the Beaten Path

While driving off the beaten path yesterday, my thoughts wandered astray, as well. Nancy and I, traveling to St. Louis for the holiday, took a detour off the interstate to see Springfield, Missouri, and as we were driving through town, I saw a psychic's shop. The sight got me thinking about what kinds of people might bring their custom to the establishment. Of course believers in a generic "spirituality" would come, as would the skeptics, pranksters, and thrill-seekers. But in this Bible-belt town, I would also expect many Christians to confer with the psychic; while some of their neighbors no doubt think the Tarot deck sinful, I'm sure others approach with trusting heart, open mind, and a sincere faith in a Lord Who works in mysterious ways.

Wandering from tangent to tangent, my thoughts went next to various sects I had encountered in my reading this year. The first that came to mind were the Sethians, who show up in Patrick O'Brian's Letter of Marque. Sethianism has some relation to gnosticism, although the exact nature of this mystery religion certainly remains mysterious to me. Apparently they believe that Seth was a divine emanation, or an avatar of Christ, or something like that. According to O'Brian, they survived into nineteenth-century England, where they believed that painting the name of Seth in large letters on their homes (or ships) would ensure protection, and that erasing the name (so as, perhaps, to sail the Atlantic without revealing any unusual identifying marks to every enemy ship that passes) would bring destruction.

In Durant this year, I read about the Waldensians and Albigensians of medieval southern France. The Waldensians, in Durant's telling anyway, primarily attacked the practices of the Church and not tenets of Christology: they translated the Bible into their current language and rejected the authority of the worldly priesthood. The Albigensians, again according to Durant's clear-cut categories, shared these traits but also denied the deity of Christ. Although I have much less sympathy for the second group than for the first, I relate to both far more than I can relate to the Church hierarchy that started killing them. On this Thanksgiving morning, I thank God once again for Dominic, who, sharing the sects' disdain for riches, preached Christ to them in a simple robe and with gentle words, and cleared many towns of heretics by conversion rather than by immolation.

This past month, I left the path of my planned list to read Edward Rutherford's Russka. There I encountered Russian Orthodox believers who, like my imagined Springfieldians, mix their Christianity, some with belief in the firebird and water spirits and some with socialism. And of course I read in Williams, Trollope, and the Father Brown stories about many types of Christians, heretical or otherwise. I also read some books by fringe Christians: Wordsworth, for instance, who left and returned to the Anglican Church but didn't believe in the divinity of Christ, and Hegel, who styled himself a Christian but seemed to have viewed God as an entity whose mind evolved along with the universe. And then there's Dickens, who kept his faith mostly hidden, perhaps even from himself, but who once famously claimed to have written every book for the purpose of proclaiming the Lord "who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see" (to quote Tiny Tim).

It's very easy for me to judge the practitioners of these various sects. To my human eyes, some seem completely reasonable, and others sound utterly hopeless. But I can't shake the image of Dominic, who tried not to view the world with human eyes and who humbly spoke the truth to people whose beliefs lay off the beaten path. And I have to remember that only God can judge whether a person's life lies off the crucified Way.

Four Germans and an Austrian . . . and an Englishman

Just after struggling so long with Spengler and having regretted including so many Germans in one year of my plan, I picked up Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall. I see great similarities in the styles of Kant, Hegel, Spengler, and Bonhoeffer. They're Germans, so they all want to be organized. But while their sometimes intricate tables of contents show a lot of organizational effort, their arguments often don't. Descartes thought of geometry as the most organized discipline, so he wrote some of his philosophical works like geometry books: he started with carefully explained axioms and built up his theorems bit by bit so the reader could (mostly) follow. But the Germans just jump into the middle of their ideas with special terminology and unexplained metaphors. Spengler, for instance, talks about the Baroque of the ancient world or about Faustian civilization as if they need no explanation. He doesn't explain until halfway through the book that the "West" of the title of his book doesn't mean what you probably think it means. Kant has his apodeictic judgments and his transcendental objects (which are different from transcendent objects), and Hegel has his reflections and negations. They often sound more like prophets than schoolteachers, receiving their mind-boggling visions from a greater Mind and then trying as hard as they can to describe the wheels within wheels.

Bonhoeffer fits right into this tradition of jumping into the middle of things. In fact, his first confusing metaphor is the very idea of the middle. Humans, he says, are in the middle. The Bible starts with a declaration of the beginning, which people in the middle can't understand and can't begin to know of without a revelation from God. Jesus is the Beginning and the End, and we are in the middle. It's pretty, and I think I learned something from the times Bonhoeffer used it. But is it a consistent metaphor? Does Jesus have a gap between beginning and end? Since we're in the middle, do we fill the gap in Jesus? (Pascal famously said the opposite.) Or are we in some other middle?

Bonhoeffer clearly gets this style from the Germans who preceded him, because he alludes to them frequently. Some of his allusions he makes explicit, some I recognized having read the other books, and some I discovered only by doing searches of some Latin phrases I didn't know. Bonhoeffer knows German philosophy and uses it often in this theological work, but he knows when to draw from it in a positive way and when to argue against it.

For instance, he says that the Day and Night created on (or themselves constituting) the first day represent the dialectic of creation, the constant ballet of existence and negation that all of creation dances. This dialectical idea is what Hegel is most famous for, and surely Bonhoeffer had Hegel in mind when he said this. Later he says that with the death of Christ on the cross "the nihil negativum broke its way into God's own being," another idea I just read in Hegel this past spring. But I notice that where Hegel says God's very essence involves the opposition of death and life, Bonhoeffer knows that God is Life alone and that death must "break its way" into God's being. In another place, he simply calls Hegel wrong for enthroning Reason in God's place. Bonhoeffer also explicitly contradicts Kant, who said that the only good thing possible is a good will, by pointing out that God declared his creation good.

I haven't read much Schopenhauer yet, but in looking up nihil negativum and its companion phrase nihil privativum, I found that they came from Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea. (The latter is a nothingness that exists as an absence of something positive, as darkness is the absence of light. The former is absolute nothingness.) Bonhoeffer alludes to Nietzsche by saying that, before eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam lived beyond good and evil. He makes an interesting allusion to Freud's theory of dreams when he says that the common human dream of trying to escape something is a manifestation of the subconscious knowledge of our fallen state. And he refers to the popularizer of evolution simply by saying that the creation of Adam has nothing to do with Darwin.

Bonhoeffer's nuanced references to these philosophers encourages me. Obviously he had studied these non-Christian (or at the very least less-than-orthodox) philosophers, finding them not only not detrimental to the thinking of a Christian but even helpful. And now I'll cite an African, St. Augustine, who, in his treatise On Christian Doctrine, declared that "All truth is God's truth." All correct, wise, or beautiful statements are possible only because of God, so what does it matter what human utters them? Augustine's approval of the use of pagan literature in the education of Christians secured the place of the classics in the medieval curriculum; in fact, it probably saved a lot of literature we enjoy today from the ravages of both time and puritans. And now I benefit today from the works of pagan philosophers (Aristotle, Nietzsche, etc.), from the Christians who approved their study, and from Christians -- like Bonhoeffer -- who demonstrated the rewards of knowing them.

Watching the Sunset

We have a large bush in the front garden that I have to trim back every fall. I go outside, usually on one of the first cool Saturday mornings, grab the shears and the stepladder, and start on the front. The trimming here usually goes quickly and smoothly. Evenly distributed, leafing branches have sent out shoots during the spring and summer, and these thin additions come off without much effort, leaving a full, symmetrical, rounded body of green. But then I move to the back, and eventually to the top. In these places, the foliage on the old surface is sparser, making room for thick limbs that have thrust through to steal the light. I don't know just how this works: many of these massive runners come from near the bottom of the central trunks, passing without branch or leaf through many feet of the core before exploding at the surface. Apparently these interlopers don't know and don't care that the thinner twigs can expand in these areas with much less effort; the aggressors just see an opportunity and grab it.

Last Friday, I started Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. I expected some kind of rather linear chronology of recent events in Europe, with praise for whatever epoch or structure Spengler saw as the pinnacle of history and blame for whatever trends he saw as causes for departure from the zenith. Instead, I found first an attempt to describe a new philosophy of history. But his new philosophy apparently includes the tenet that history can't be explained, only intuited. And so he can't really explain it and instead just talks around and around it. His language reminds me of the wild, self-promoting branches in my holly. With seemingly little regard for order or traditional definitions of words and little respect for the risks of unbroken streams of abstract statements, Spengler's prose finds one idea after another bursting to the fore begging for what attention it can grab before its sudden eclipse. Here's an example, chosen completely randomly:

       Systematic philosophy closes with the end of the eighteenth century. Kant put its utmost possibilities in forms both grand in themselves and -- as a rule -- final for the Western soul. He is followed, as Plato and Aristotle were followed, by a specifically megalopolitan philosophy that was not speculative but practical, irreligious, social-ethical. This philosophy . . . begins in the West with Schopenhauer, who is the first to make the Will to life ("creative life force") the centre of gravity of his thought, although the deeper tendency of his doctrine is obscured by his having, under the influence of a great tradition, maintained the obsolete distinctions of phenomena and things-in-themselves and suchlike.

This passage leaves me with more questions than answers: What makes a philosophy systematic? What are its utmost possibilities? How does Spengler know the utmost possibilities of philosophy? How can Kant give the final word when philosophers such as Hegel claim to build on Kant? If Kant is the last philosopher of the earlier school and Schopenhauer the first of the new, what is Hegel? How does Goethe, who lived between Kant and Schopenhauer and whom Spengler elsewhere calls a philosopher, fit in? What is a megalopolitan philosophy? How can he categorize Plato, Aristotle, and Kant as speculative philosophers in contrast to the supposedly ethical philosophies that followed them, when each wrote books on ethics? What is the deeper tendency of Schopenhauer's doctrine? What makes a tradition great? The only thing I actually understand in the passage is the "distinctions of phenomena and things-in-themselves," and they are declared obsolete. Yet how can the tradition be obsolete while Schopenhauer maintains it?

Despite the overwhelming effusion of abstract, unsupported statements, though, I'm enjoying the read so far. He seems to be saying that history does not proceed on a single, millennia-long path of progress, and I have no trouble agreeing. Rather, he says, the world teems with cultures that pursue a destiny, following a determined story arc told over and over again: cultures rise on a wave of creativity shaped by local relationships, then become civilized (by which he means both stultified and national or even imperial) and ebb. Every aspect of culture -- art, religion, politics, science, trade, technology, and so on -- works together to symbolize the culture. As a result of this view, Spengler's treatment races between topics and across eras. After the rather long introduction, which mentions each of the topics just listed, Spengler moves to a treatment of mathematics, which, he says, always represents a philosophy. The part of the chapter I've read so far makes reference to the Egyptian Ahmes, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Aristarchus, Al-Khwarizmi, Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, Newton, and many others. Along the way, Spengler lights momentarily on architecture, religion, astronomy, painting, and musical instruments.

In an interesting coincidence, I just read today a passage in which Spengler talks about Euclid's dependence on natural numbers even though hypotenuses can't always be measured by them, a topic I blogged about recently. Spengler credits Euclid's view to a fear of the infinite. As with everything else in the chapter, Spengler doesn't say anywhere near enough to convince me he's right or even to suggest how I might decide whether he's right. But he sure has me thinking.

Given Spengler's firm belief in predetermined unfolding of history, I'm amazed by his slight of Hegel. But then maybe he saw Hegel as a rival claimant to his throne. Because, for all his insistence that truths are relative to culture, Spengler, like Hegel, declares himself the first to provide mankind with the right view of the universe. His book, he says, "is laden . . . with all the defects of a first attempt . . . . Nevertheless I am convinced that it contains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once enunciated clearly, will (I repeat) be accepted without dispute." It's almost a self-parody. But, like Monty Python's soccer game between the ancient Greek philosophers and the modern Germans (most of which players Spengler mentions in the first thirty pages of the book), so far Decline of the West provokes thought even while it entertains.

Progress with Hegel

In Plato's Apology, Socrates tells the story of the origins of his philosophical mission. The oracle at Delphi, he says, once announced that no one was wiser than Socrates. Socrates didn't think himself wise at all, so, bewildered by the prophecy, he set out to interrogate people who had reputations of wisdom. But he found that none were wise, although they all thought themselves so. Since everyone proved unwise, Socrates' conclusion was that the only difference between himself and these others -- his only superiority in wisdom -- lay in knowing that he was not wise.

I'm a fan of intellectual humility. All the evidence points to it as the proper attitude. Intellectual pride causes problems and makes people obnoxious. Our daily routine of mistakes and forgetfulness indicates mental weakness in humans. And faith tells us that God is beyond our comprehension, indicating a constitutional limit to our intellectual capacity. So it's with great trepidation that I set out to comment on something as complex as Hegel's philosophy, a system that causes many experts to admit their befuddlement. But here's a report of my limited view of Hegel.

His system begins with an interesting observation about being and identity. Psychologists tell us that a baby doesn't begin with a concept of self but develops it only when he figures out that these other characters running around are other selves. Hegel may have been the first to suggest such a process of discovery, although he described it not in relation to a single human's intellectual development but in relation to the whole universe. Whether anyone understands it yet or not, Person A can't be a person without the existence of Person B to establish the boundaries of what is and isn't Person A. Even more fundamentally, a thing called Being has no identity without a thing called Nothing. In fact, pure Being -- Being that doesn't serve as a quality of some existing thing -- is therefore not the Being of anything; it is Nothing. And since we can think of Nothing, Nothing is something that can be thought; Nothing has Being. The two have equal status and are reconciled by a constant process of Becoming.

Hegel bases his philosophy on these observations, and everything he discusses, he describes as existing in a perpetual flow of Becoming, as having both a history and a destiny. Importantly, this change, says Hegel, is overall one of progress. Humans become more wise, governments become more just, society becomes more free over time, and this progress is simply the inevitable way of the world. Peter Singer, the author of the extremely helpful Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, says that of all philosophers, Hegel would be the most disappointed to see how later generations adapted his ideas. Many totalitarian states (all of the Marxist states) drew justification directly or indirectly from Hegel's tenet that countries develop and change according to a fixed pattern. Surely Hegel, the great proponent of progress, wouldn't see Hitler's Germany as an improvement over the Fatherland he knew in the nineteenth century.

But progress in political history forms only one part of Hegel's theory of Becoming. According to Hegel, the fundamental truth of the universe is something he calls Spirit. This Spirit, like everything in Hegel's view, develops over the eons to a state of perfection. The appearance of humans and the psychological development of our race play parts in the progress of Spirit. Every advance we make, we make on behalf of universal Spirit. Art gets us closer to our destiny, but religion surpasses art, and philosophy even surpasses religion. And philosophy itself follows a determined path toward perfection. Every new idea, every discovery of the hidden truths of existence lends to the progress of the universe toward Absolute Spirit, a state in which the totality of existence (which our minds represent and serve) knows itself truly and knows that knowing itself is the only true knowledge. There is no distinction between an object and the perception of that object, no distinction between the knower and the known. As soon as humanity has discovered this truth, the purpose of all of history will have been met, the goal of the universe reached.

Considering this fuller picture of Hegel's system, should one be surprised at how people received and used the philosophy? As Singer points out, Hegel claims to have found the perspective that serves as the destination of the history of the world. Although Hegel doesn't say so directly, the amazing message is clearly implied: Hegel is the goal of history. The fundamental force of the universe has been operating for all of existence in order to prepare the way for Hegel, to produce him, and to have him discover the truth. His ideas complete the search undertaken by philosophy. His thoughts have reached the resting place that all art, all religion have longed for. In some ways I'm surprised that no one has started a Hegelian cult. (I was going to say "Hegelian religion," but that would be a contradiction, since Hegel claims that his philosophy surpasses religion.) A philosophy propounded by a man with such astonishing confidence in his unique importance can only have two consequences: either many people of many temperaments and levels of intelligence will find him a holy man and find his words spiritually nourishing, or else the masses will find the system lacking and the powermongers will adopt it as a tool.

At the very least, couldn't we guess that Hegel shouldn't be surprised that humanity might slip downhill after having reached the pinnacle? Claiming to have found the answer to life, the universe, and everything is like carrying a torch in the dynamite shed. It's much safer to follow Socrates and admit ignorance.

Hegel and the Ideal in Art

The scene in African Queen where Humphrey Bogart has to get back into the water knowing about the leeches came to mind recently. I saw the picture of his reluctant face the other day when I picked up Hegel again for the second half of my reading assignment. Hegel's prose is often dense and difficult to understand, I don't usually agree with it when I do understand it, and much of it I don't enjoy reading. (No two of those reactions necessarily go together.) But I hold my determination to read to the end because so much of the academic work I read refers to Hegel.

In my last post, I called Potok's The Book of Lights a book about everything. Hegel certainly intended for his philosophical writings to cover everything. In various places, he addresses being and nothingness, God, man, mind and matter, logic, ethics, politics, economics, psychology, world history, art, religion, and philosophy. Stephen Houlgate's Hegel Reader for Blackwell Press admirably brings together pertinent excerpts from each of his works and, as hard as parts of it are to read, shows that Hegel saw his philosophy as a unified system that explained Everything.

I could certainly be wrong about this, but it occurred to me the other day that I don't know of anyone who has adopted Hegelian ethics as a way of life. Marx famously adopted (and adapted) Hegel's view of history as unfolding in a determined order. Houlgate mentions many other famous thinkers who have drawn inspiration from Hegel's logic, theology, psychology, and aesthetics. And from my training as a music theorist, I know that Moritz Hauptman applied Hegel's philosophy of Becoming to musical structure. But I don't know of anyone who has decided to live as a Hegelian, and that lack stands as an indictment against Hegel, because his work is supposed to hang together as one coherent system. Apparently it does not.

So when I say that recently I have read some things in Hegel that I liked, I'm not saying that his system suddenly looks more plausible. An unaimed weapon sometimes hits its mark, and a stopped clock is right twice a day. The first passage that captured my interest concerns the Ideal in art. Art should reveal the Ideal, Hegel says, and the Ideal is serene. The Ideal has no need for change or agitation. The best art then depicts joy and peace. Dissonance, sorrow, and ugliness have their place, but they must be presented in a spirit of "joyful submission." "Shrieking," he says. "whether of grief or of mirth, is not music at all. Even in suffering, the sweet tone of lament must sound through the griefs and alleviate them, so that it seems to us worth while so to suffer as to understand this lament."

This view makes some sense to me. I certainly prefer singing to shrieking, and I find laments the most satisfying or comforting when they convey an element of sweetness and understanding. But sometimes music full of shouting is right for the moment, and sometimes a bitter lesson must be swallowed. I scolded the schools in a recent post for teaching only authors such as Fitzgerald and Crane. I only meant to suggest that curricula balance these books with others of a different outlook. My complaint certainly doesn't extend to these authors themselves or their works. The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, and Death of a Salesman are beautiful works of art for all of their message of despair. They may be about loss, death, and "the horror," yet this literature, too, has its serenity in its form, in its honesty, in its appeal to an audience for sympathy. Schoenberg's unrelieved dissonance reveals a deep truth in its use of music to express the anguished heart.

Now I think that bad art exists. Its fault could come from unskilled mishandling of the artist's original intentions, from an intention to portray a dangerous ethic, from a dishonest misrepresentation of the human condition, or (and we've all been there) simply from a shallow vision not ultimately worth the time of the audience. But can one make art that is entirely ugly? Does bad art -- bad in any of the four ways just suggested -- truly have no value at all? Humans don't make art ex nihilo. Are not the materials beautiful because provided by the Creator? Is not the simplest, most unskilled human action in itself wondrous to behold? We certainly think so in the case of our own children. It seems to me that the Ideal can be found in a poem, song, or painting despite the least skill or the worst of intentions. Perhaps it's just that some art conveys the Ideal without demanding so much charity and searching on the part of the audience.

I have no answers for the flip side of this question, but it intrigues me. Can beautiful art exist without any element of pain? Even art intended to direct its human audience to the contemplation of the Divine must speak to that human audience, and those humans live in pain. They live in need of being directed to the Divine because their lives are far from Ideal. So it seems that even the happiest art, if it is to be good and honest, must have dissonances and conflicts to resolve. The reason Barney the Dinosaur was so hard for me to watch as a parent was that the kids on the show were always happy and kind (and that Barney had no elbows).

And yet what will music be like in Heaven? Will "those wounds" truly be "yet visible above" in the city where God promises no sorrow or pain? Will the music of the Blessed Realm still reflect separation, sorrow, and sin? Will it be beautiful without the element of pain that beauty requires here? Will it be less than beautiful? None of these three scenarios makes sense to me. I ponder such things, but I also know that the physics of the new heaven and earth may be so new that dissonance will be completely different or even impossible.

Coming Up for Air

My recent reading adventures have reminded me of an experience in swimming lessons long, long ago. We were in the deep diving pool, and the instructor kept tossing a hard rubber block into the water and telling one of us to dive down and retrieve it. I watched other boys bring up the block, so I could see it was a doable task. But when my turn came, I encountered some problems. I had probably never gone six feet under before, and I found out that becomes harder at about that depth to keep going father down. But I expelled some air as I had been taught, and I went farther. I certainly had never gone down ten feet before, and the painful pressure on my ears surprised me. But a little facial stretch and a quick second to build some courage brought new resolve, and I kept going. Then the last two feet almost stopped me. I reached for the block only to find it was farther away than it looked. Darned refraction! I also started wondering whether I had the air to make it back up from eleven feet, let alone twelve. And my ears hurt, very badly. But the other boys had done it, so I pushed out more air and gave one more kick and grabbed the rubber block.

No one told me how heavy it was! I relaxed and pointed my body upwards, but I went nowhere. I gave a kick and moved a bit, and then tried using my hands -- aggh, my one free hand -- and moved a bit faster. The pain moved from my ears to my lungs as I rose, and I began to have serious doubts that I would make it to the top. At some point, all thoughts and doubts disappeared, and my body just started doing what it had to do to survive. I could see the wavy surface above me but had no idea how far away it was. It looked like I had three more feet to go, then five, then two, then ten.

Then suddenly things were different. I heard the world again and quit going up. Without waiting for my mind to think it through, my mouth opened up and sucked in air as fast as possible. Instantly I knew what to do again, how to move, how to reach the side of the pool. I had the use of both hands again. Where was the rubber block? Did I drop it? Did the instructor take it? Was it just suddenly much lighter than it seemed twelve feet of water pressure ago? I don't know. I only know that I didn't have to go down again.

I struggled more with Hegel over the last two weeks than I thought I would, and the experience felt very much like that dive. It became harder and harder, and my mind started thinking that I might not be able to make it through another twenty pages without collapsing into idiocy. But at the beginning of the year, knowing I would probably have some difficulties with this dense philosophy, even if I didn't know their extent, I scheduled Aquinas after Hegel, because reading Aquinas often feels like breathing sweet, precious oxygen into burning lungs. He's just so orderly and sensible and so very much in love with God.

I remember distinctly a sensation of utter mystification the first time I tried reading a page of the Summa Theologica. I was in my twenties, and I hadn't read any Aristotle. Fifteen years later, with a grounding in "The Philosopher's" system, Aquinas's great work is not just easy to read but encouraging and inspiring. "Inspiration" by its roots refers to the intake of breath (whether one's own or God's), so the memory of the swimming lesson comes naturally. Last week I wasn't sure I could see the surface, but today the weight is gone and forgotten, and I'm breathing with joy.

A Dialectical Bog

The Hegel readings got very tough this week. I tried to take notes and follow along, but many long passages made no sense at all to me. Most of the problem lies with me: I just don't have the background, the philosophical skills, or the time to read it until I understand it. Of course, some of the problem may be Hegel's: it could be that he doesn't ultimately make sense. My first impression of many sections is that I'm reading the work of a madman dancing incessantly in circles around the same dense tangle of words that have meaning (or seem to have meaning) only to him -- and that impression could be partly true. But many people understand Hegel better than I, so I know I've simply set myself a frustrating task beyond my capabilities.

But I find a few consolations here in my Hegelian Slough of Despond. First, learning nothing is learning something. That sentence actually sounds dangerously like Hegel, who posed that Being and Nothing are not contradictory but rather inseparably entwined: the one implies the other and in fact is the other. (If you can think of Nothing, then Nothing is the content of your thought, and since your mind is operating, the content of its thought must be something, or some Thing. Thus Nothing is a Thing: it has and is Being.) But I don't have a Hegelian meaning in mind. I mean that if I learn nothing of the content of Hegel's writing on a given day, I have at least learned that I can't understand him, in addition to learning what his writing style is like and what terms were important to him. I didn't know just how difficult this would be until a couple of weeks ago, so that's progress.

Second, suspecting that I might not enjoy every day of my experience with Hegel, I scheduled the book in two big sessions, with a few weeks in between. So I read (or tried to read) every day this last week knowing that on Friday I would get a break. Sometime in late May or early June I'll come back to the anthology refreshed and ready for some hard work again. And who knows? The next section of the reader might be easier; I understood a lot of what I read the first few days, after all.

Third, my trouble understanding Hegel drives me humbly to seek help. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provided a lot of clarification, as usual. (I highly recommend it!) Even this reliable reference, though, lost me in its section on Hegel's logic (the part of the Hegel anthology that has caused me all the trouble). But I also consulted Peter Singer's A Very Short Introduction to Hegel and found an explanation there that I could follow. In fact, he mostly touched on points that I had written in my notes, making me think that I had at least found the key phrases, even if I didn't understand them at first.

Fourth, I know that Hegel is not really waiting to be understood. Singer says that virtually no reputable philosopher in the world thinks Hegel succeeded in establishing a coherent, helpful, accurate system of the Way Things Are. The point in studying him is that many other influential people did think so: Marx and, indirectly, Hitler, for instance. So merely getting the key phrases will at least help me understand a bit better when I see Hegel's name invoked as I read about other figures in history.

But why not just read Singer's book about Hegel and be done with it? Partly because I want the chance to experience these things for myself; reading about the Grand Canyon is not the same as seeing it first-hand. I also want to read Hegel because ideas stick in my mind better when I read them in their original sources; that's been true for me with Aristotle, Euclid, Freud, Dostoevsky, and many other writers. But mostly I want to come back to Hegel and give him another try in a few weeks because that's what this whole project is about. I take this journey through literature ready to discover whatever I discover, even if my discovery involves only my own limitations.

Triage

A moment I have not awaited eagerly has come: the time to blog about Hegel. I've been at it a few days, and so far I understand about a third of what I read and like even less. So what do I say? I know I have a degree with Philosophiae in the title, but I'm not a professional philosopher, so how do I critique this? The moment calls for courage -- courage to admit my limitations and courage to share my tentative responses.

Hegel was an enormously influential philosopher, even -- or especially -- among nineteenth-century music theorists. He comes up in a lot that I read, so I've wanted to tackle him for a long time. The Britannica set comes with a Hegel volume, and I duly read my assignment as I was going through the set's reading schedule. But the reading in that first plan came from the Philosophy of History, and based on what I had read about him in other sources, it seemed that I hadn't reached the core ideas. Not that I didn't learn some things: Hegel's idea that the invasions of Rome by Germanic barbarians started civilization rather than quenching it for a while does a lot to explain the sense of national superiority that led Germany to such troubling visions of domination between 1870 and 1945. But I knew I needed to read more, especially the Phenomenology of Spirit.

In putting together my current Ten-Year Plan, I decided on a reader published by Blackwell that contains a lot of the Phenomenology and excerpts from several other works as well. It's a long book: 530 fairly large pages filled with Hegel's dense prose, and I made a plan to read it all. But how? I have to go into it knowing that I'm not going to understand it. That admission, far from making the task more daunting, actually frees me to go at a pace that will get me through the anthology in some timely fashion; in this case, I decided on twenty pages a day, using a triage approach. If something makes sense, I just mark it: it's probably a main point. If something doesn't make sense, I glance over it quickly and try not to worry about it. If something almost makes sense, I might try to read it a second time. But the point is to get through the book so I can get a basic idea of Hegel's main thoughts from Hegel's own words (or at least translations of Hegel's own words), so I try not to go back over very much.

Here's a summary of what I have so far: Common experience tells us that we are surrounded by things, and, even if our senses can be doubted (Is that straw really bent as it enters the water? Is my red the same as your red? etc.), we feel that at least we know that the things we sense exist absolutely, and that we know them without mediation. But, says Hegel, if we examine the perceptive process, we find two objects: an 'I' and a 'this'. We only sense 'this' through the 'I' that sees it, and we only sense 'I' because it has experiences of 'this' (and, supposedly, 'that'). So everything we sense, he says, we sense through something else and not immediately. If we are truly to have immediate knowledge, we have to give up the distinction of subject and object, give up on the 'I' (why do so many philosophers want to deny the individual human soul?!), give up on the absolute existence of things, and realize that everything is a part of pure thought examining itself. The history of the world is the development of pure thought learning this lesson.

I'll be honest and say it sounds a little crazy, although I know I'm not truly qualified to judge. I think it's safe to say, though, that it would be easier to judge if it were easier to read. After writing the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel said he felt the urge to become accessible to a wider audience. But the editor of my anthology says that the resulting book, the Science of Logic, puzzles even philosophers. I note in this section of the reader that Hegel made additions, and additions to the additions, indicating that he thought that even the published corrections of the published original didn't say everything it should. Now, I know that many intelligent, trained people have found Hegel's ideas helpful, but I tell my students (and had teachers tell me) that if the prose isn't clear, it's probably because the ideas aren't clear in the writer's mind.

Well, that took a lot of nerve to say. Hegel could be completely comprehensible to the best experts and yet totally opaque to the layman, like some music theory. But the other day I read Hegel's explanation of why philosophy is so hard to understand, and his explanation made me think the blame should not rest wholly on my ignorance. He says philosophy makes claims about specific things, while language can only talk about universals; so philosophy always says the opposite of what it means, and that's why it's so hard to read. Can that really be the reason Hegel's work is so hard to get through? Some philosophy, after all, is easy to read (Plato comes quickly to mind). Also, by his argument all language should be equally difficult to understand, so his theory doesn't explain why philosophy -- and his in particular -- is especially difficult. OK, it's courage or nerve or foolish recklessness or whatever you want to call it, but I think that in this passage, Hegel might only have been trying to justify his lack of effective self-editing.

But he's one of the most influential philosophers of the last two-hundred years, and I want to keep reading, so I'll just continue to apply my triage procedure based on how well I understand a passage, and that way I'll do a little of my own editing.

Looking Forward

Each December as a part of my annual routine, I review the closing year by rereading my notes from the past twelve months, and I start to look over the next year's book list with anticipation.  This year I think back over the fun and learning and even the disappointments of 2010 with great satisfaction and no regrets, and 2011 promises to be another pleasurable, fulfilling year.

Each year begins with Greek classics, and 2011 begins with a return to some favorites.  The three plays by Aristophanes are among his most accessible for the reader of 2500 years later.  Many college students of today read Lysistrata and discover great troves of humor.  I can't help but think that the name of Thesmophoriazusae is all that keeps its sneaking and crossdressing and silliness from entertaining today's youth.  And The Odyssey tells one of the world's greatest stories.  I talk about it at least once every year to my music classes as an iconic model of a plot that works well in music also: the journey is full of adventure, and more dangerous surprises await even after we get home.  Beethoven and Homer are not all that different.

The philosophical selections always require a lot of pondering and note-taking, but I love getting stumped on some given day's six-page assignment, pondering and wondering during the rest of the day, having a moment of clarification the next morning, and then reviewing the notes of the last few days to see how much clearer the whole thing seems – including passages that I was too clueless about even to be stumped on.  Sometimes the moment of clarification comes, not just a day, but years later.  Reading Aristotle's Topics for the first time made much in his other works clearer.  (It will probably have this effect again this year.)  Reading Aquinas often makes Aristotle clearer and vice versa.  And Kant is nearly indecipherable on first reading, so I know rereading a crucial part of his most important treatise will light a lot of bulbs.

I don't know if I'm going to enjoy Hegel or not; I'm hoping to understand him at least.  Having read his Philosophy of History, I recognize some of the ideas when his name comes up in other (usually academic) reading.  But I don't get it – and not just because it's not the kind of philosophy I'm not going to agree with.  Plato talks of a world soul, and I get it.  Spinoza talks of the universe as a unity, and I get it.  Darwin talks about all life forms evolving through undirected variation, and I get it.  I don't believe any of these ideas, but their authors make the ideas clear enough that I know what it is I don't believe and can see why others do believe it.  But Hegel talks about a single universal consciousness that evolves, and I don't get it, perhaps because he seems to write in terms that made sense only to him, not to me.  I'm hoping that both the variety of selections and the editor's notes in the anthology I chose will help.

Most of the fiction and history for the year is fated to give me great pleasure and understanding.  David Copperfield is one of the world's very greatest novels, and my second favorite book by my favorite author.  If there were fewer books in the world, I could read David Copperfield once every year for the rest of my life and not get tired of it.  O'Brian, Plutarch, Thackeray, Durant, Williams, Catton, Trollope, and Waugh have all entertained me greatly in the past, and I'm sure the books of theirs that I've picked for 2011 will please.

Then there's Richard Blackmore's Lorna Doone.  Both names are rather famous today: the first as the name of a member of the rock band Deep Purple, and the second as a cookie.  Neither is a household name in reference to literature, though, so I don't have high expectations in this quarter.

The most wondrously glowing item on the reading list for 2011 is the beginning of Orlando Furioso.  Twenty years ago or so, I was reading something or other by C. S. Lewis, and he mentioned Orlando Furioso as an example or analogy that he assumed was familiar to every reader.  My heart ached as I read the passage, and I had my last really angry regret about my weak, space-age education.  Just after thinking, "Why weren't my schools better?!" I thought, "You can read all the classics you want to.  Just start reading."  Soon afterwards, I began my search for the right set of books and the right reading plan.  I settled on the Britannica set and its ten-year reading plan, and I loved the experience so much I drew up my own second ten-year plan, some of the fruits of which you are enjoying (or at least experiencing) now.  But as much as I felt I was finally getting the education in classical lierature I had always wanted, it occurred to me that I had not read the book that started it all.  This year, I go back to the beginning and start Orlando Furioso.

It will be a great year of great literature and the first full year with my blog.  Happy New Year, and thanks for sharing part of the experience with me.